by Paul Bew
Parnell made no public response to this package offer. It was a wise move because Devoy felt moved to offer an even more explicit gloss two days later: he set up a bogus New York Herald interview: ‘To what extent do you and your friends propose to support the active section of the Home Rulers led by Mr Parnell?’ he asked himself, in a spectacular example of journalistic news management.
We won’t support them at all, except they give up their federal programme, and exclude sectarianism from their policy. We don’t propose, for instance, to hand over the education of the rising generation exclusively to the Catholic hierarchy, many of whom are the bitterest enemies of an Irish independent nationality . . . There are more pressing questions to be settled than the education question. The land question is the vital one in Ireland and demands immediate attention.56
To make matters even more explicit, Devoy’s article also contained a strong political message:
There is no use sending men to the British parliament to beg, but we can send men there to protest before the world against England’s right to govern Ireland, and when all is ripe, we can command our representatives to withdraw from the British parliament and meet in Ireland as an Irish legislature [my italics]. It is only through such means that the whole Irish race the world over can be aroused and their active sympathy enlisted; and when that occurs, I claim that the work is half done and we can wait patiently for the result.57
The interesting idea is here that a mobilisation on the land issue could lead to an Irish withdrawal from parliament. What did Parnell think of all this? This very public musing on a revolutionary strategy for Irish nationalism certainly placed him in an interesting position.
Parnell, it has to be said, was frank enough in his dealings with these ‘neo-Fenians’. On 12 May 1878 Davitt put the idea to Parnell of a ‘war against landlordism’ which would help to create a more vigorous Irish party:
An Irish party of this calibre, at an opportune time—that is, when the country was sufficiently organised—to make a reasoned demand in Parliament for a repeal of the Act of Union, and in the event of the ultimatum being refused to leave the House of Commons in a body, return to Ireland; summon a national convention, and let the members of the party go into session as an informal legislative assembly.
Parnell’s reply was both sceptical and instant: ‘And what next?’ The reply was typical Parnell: he impressed the neo-Fenians with his poise and daring, but at the same time he displayed a kind of watchfulness. He made it clear that he saw it as his duty to ‘re-establish faith in parliamentary work of an open and honest kind’.58
A few days after Devoy’s offer Parnell decided to accept an invitation from the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association to speak in the west of Ireland. Shrouded as he was in an aura of republican conspiracy, it is hardly surprising to find that Parnell was not a completely respectable figure in Irish politics. Outside his own constituency of Meath the clergy regarded him warily. As James Kilmartin, the president of the Ballinasloe Tenants’ Defence Association, later recalled: ‘The priests would not then identify with Parnell. None of them would take the chair, and only two took places on the platform.’59
At the meeting held at Ballinasloe on 3 November Parnell was forthright enough in his expression of views on the land question:
There were five and a half millions of people in this country, enough people to win their own freedom, and if they were determined, they would win it; they would win the land and the right of living on the soil under the landlords by paying rent, or by purchasing from the landlords and becoming possessors of their own farms (applause). He himself was in favour of the latter system, which prevailed in France and Prussia, and would prevail in Ireland (hear, hear).60
However, perhaps in response to the chill of clerical disapproval, he retreated later in the month from an exclusive emphasis on the principle of peasant proprietorship and made it clear that the ‘three Fs’ (fair rent, fixity of tenure, free sale) was still the object of practical reformers.
4
But what was Parnell’s precise contribution to the debate on the land question? In particular, what was the relationship he perceived between the land question and the national question in Ireland? This is a matter of fundamental importance which must be understood if Parnell’s true role in Irish politics is to be grasped. The nature of this relationship was the subject of intense debate in the late 1870s. It is necessary to outline this debate before it is possible to understand the novelty of Parnell’s contribution.
The basic problem lay in the fact that the British parliament was perceived to be unalterably opposed to Irish agrarian demands. At the end of May 1875 the Irish newspapers reported Isaac Butt’s view of the matter: ‘I would be lending myself to the wildest and most mischievous of delusions if I led you to believe that there is any chance of the present House of Commons passing a measure even approaching to that which would meet the wants and wishes of the Irish occupiers.’61 John Devoy, for his part, put it more bluntly five years later when he insisted that the ‘demands of the Land League will not be granted by a Parliament of British landlords. Of course they won’t.’62 On the other side of the political spectrum, the Dublin Evening Mail proclaimed that Home Rule MPs must know the British parliament would never consent to such interference with the rights of property and the principles of political economy; hence, it maintained, the agitators were merely stirring up hopes which they knew never could be fulfilled in order to trick the farmers into subscribing to political funds.63
In early 1878 William Bolster, a key figure of the Limerick Farmers’ Club, had argued that the obsession with Home Rule was leading to a neglect of the tenant farmers’ interests. He stated clearly: ‘The land question should be settled first before dealing with the vital one of Home Rule.’ John Dillon, who was just beginning his long career as a prominent nationalist politician, was quick to criticise Bolster:
The more discussion there is, the more plain will it appear that there can be no rivalry between Home Rule and tenant-right. The only chance of winning tenant-right is by vigorously pressing our demand for Home Rule, when a land bill may be as a sop thrown to Cerberus. And, on the other hand, a vigorous tenant-right agitation would strengthen the Home Rulers immediately.64
However, Dillon failed to explain the mechanism by which a vigorous tenant-right agitation would actually have strengthened the Home Rulers. This was a problem which bothered also that group of ‘neo-Fenians’—of whom Michael Davitt, Patrick Egan and Thomas Brennan were the most forceful leaders—who had adopted a sympathetic attitude towards open political agitation in the 1870s. Eventually they were to solve it by declaring that, as no British government would grant peasant proprietorship in Ireland, the struggle for that end would lead to the breaking of the British link. Some thought in terms of a traditional insurrection—backed this time by a peasantry which had remained quiet in 1867, others thought in terms of an Irish withdrawal from parliament. In other words, they accepted Isaac Butt’s basic premise but reached a very different conclusion. For where Butt saw only grounds for a rather despairing brand of constitutional politics, the neo-Fenians deduced that there was a basis for revolutionary activity. They also continued to think that Parnell was a credible ally. He was, after all, presenting an attractive figure.
The language of John Devoy in mid-November 1878 is highly instructive:
The land question is the question of questions in Ireland and the one upon which the National party must speak out in the plainest language. . . . I am in favour of sweeping away every vestige of the English connexion and this accursed landlord system above and before all (tremendous applause). But while I think it right to proclaim this, and that the National party should proclaim that nothing less than this would satisfy it, I know it is a solution that cannot be reached in a day and, therefore, I think we should, in the meantime, accept all measures looking to the prevention of arbitrary eviction and a creation of a peasant proprietary as being a step in the ri
ght direction.65
Parnell, reading this, would have seen both the snare and the opportunity for the constitutionalists who wanted neo-Fenian backing. On the one hand, an abstract radicalism—which he shared—as to the final solution, on the other hand, a tacit, pragmatic reformism.
A month later Devoy elaborated even further:
No party or combination of parties in Ireland can ever hope to win the support of a majority of the people, except it honestly proposes a radical reform of the land system. No matter what might be said in favour of individual landlords, the whole system was founded on robbery and fraud, and has been perpetuated by cruelty, injustice, extortion and hatred of the people. The men who got small farms at the time of the confiscation, settled down in the country and their descendants, no matter what their political party, are now ‘bone of our bone’, have become Irish and perform a useful function in our land. No one thinks of disturbing them. If the landlords had become Irish, and treated the people with humanity, the original robbery might be overlooked: though a radical change in the tenure must come of itself some day. But when, as a class, they have simply done England’s work of rooting out the Irish people, when the history of landlordism is simply a dark story of heartless cruelty, of artificial famines, of eviction, of rags, and squalid misery, there is no reason why we should forget that the system was forced upon us by England, and that the majority of the present landlords are the inheritors of the robber horde sent over by Elizabeth and James the First, by Cromwell and William of Orange, to garrison the country for England. It is in the interest of Ireland that the land should be owned by those who till the soil, and this can be reached without even inflicting hardship on those who deserve no leniency at the hands of the Irish people. A solution of the land question has been reached to a large extent in France, in Prussia and in Belgium by enabling the occupiers to purchase their holdings. Let the Irish landlords be given a last chance of settling the land question amicably in this manner, or wait for a solution in which they shall have no part.66
Devoy was willing to envisage a staged process. The first stage would be the expropriation of the absentee Irish landlords and the London Companies. (Devoy, interestingly, makes no allowance for the fact that the London Companies were considered to be good landlords.) The process of eviction should be brought to an end. ‘But I shall be told that the English parliament will never do any of these things. Then I say these things must wait till an Irish parliament can do them better; but in the meantime, good work will have been done, sound principles will have been inculcated and the country aroused and organised.’67
This public advocacy of a new type of revolutionary politics placed Parnell in a delicate position. He was, however, to solve the problem his own way—without being forced to adopt either the pessimism of Butt or the revolutionary principles of the neo-Fenians. On 15 November 1878 Parnell made an important speech in Tralee, Co. Kerry, to a crowd of tipsy Fenian enthusiasts. He began by discussing the recent assassination of Lord Leitrim earlier in the year. Leitrim was an especially notorious Donegal landlord—arguably the most notorious figure of the post-Famine era. His management of his Leitrim and Donegal estates was authoritarian; he was disliked even by police and Dublin Castle officials, with whom he constantly quarrelled; relatives called him insane. It is widely believed that he coerced tenants’ daughters sexually by threatening evictions; his killers are Donegal folk heroes. His most recent biographer, Dr A. P. W. Malcomson, has argued that Leitrim was an efficient rationaliser of an indebted estate and that his image as a sexual predator was invented by enemies. Leitrim even showed some interest in Home Rule, engaging in a friendly correspondence with Isaac Butt, until Butt was frightened off by yet another of Leitrim’s quarrels with a tenant.68 It is not in doubt, however, that Leitrim was despised not just by the ‘usual suspects’—the local Catholic nationalist elites—but also by the liberal Presbyterian press. Following his assassination on 2 April 1878, the Presbyterian liberal Londonderry Standard showed scant remorse: ‘He had one remedy for the peccadilloes of his tenants—eviction. If they took seaweed—eviction. If they refused to give up a field which he capriciously wanted to give to somebody else—eviction. If they controverted his decision about a right of way—eviction.’69 In the parliamentary discussion of the incident, Parnell supported the right of F. H. O’Donnell to say the harshest things about the recently deceased.
Parnell, in his Kerry speech, interestingly seems to have believed that only the active Home Rule Party could save men like Leitrim:
He wanted the people of his country to save themselves from the grasp of the landlords, and to deprive those landlords of a power which turned Christians into demons, and which had brought about several of their bloody and violent deaths. He held that he was the true constitutionalist who desired to stop these things. Lord Leitrim perhaps would be living today, instead of being shot and battered about the head, if the law had not given him the power to oppress and ruin his tenantry (cheers).
Tell him not that if they had twenty men who felt the sufferings of the Irish farmers and of the Irish peasantry, and who were determined to make their grievances known in Parliament—tell him not that this question would very shortly be settled.70
Parnell said that ‘unless they went in for a revolution he did not see how they were going to bring about a radical reform of the system of land tenure in this country’. This was the view of the Fenian elements; stating it thus, only to reject it by endorsing Buttite principles, seems to place Parnell firmly in the conventional moderate camp. But this would be a mistaken interpretation, because Parnell immediately qualified his own language by offering a parliamentary road to peasant proprietorship. He talked even of a parliamentary committee, in which he took a special interest. On the motion to establish this select committee on Irish land, Parnell had argued that it could only succeed if it fully adopted the principle of peasant proprietorship.71 In the same spirit, he said in Kerry:
If after a time they found that by extension of the principles of the Bright Clauses of the Land Act (and he might tell them he hoped for important results from the Committee of the House of Commons which sat last session upon the question of the Bright Clauses)—if after a time by extending they found they could enable all the tenants of properties which came up for sale in the landed Estates Court to purchase these holdings they might be preparing the way perhaps some day for a radical alteration of the land system and for the establishment of what he believed to be the true system of land tenure in the proprietorship of the soil by the people who cultivated it.
But until that time came, if it ever did come—and there was no reason why they should not all work to bring it about (cheers)—until then it was their bound duty to amend Gladstone’s Land Act, either by bringing in a supplementary bill such as Mr Butt’s or by an amendment of the Act itself; and he confessed he doubted that it could ever be amended in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of fixity of tenure at fair rents. . . . It was their duty in the meantime to do all in their power (and they could do this) to prevent the evictions of tenants and to prevent the arbitrary raising of rents.72
We can see here Parnell dancing between the factions: at one moment leaning towards the radical republican world view, at another pulling back towards a more conventional Home Rule perspective, yet in the process expressing a characteristic Parnellite stance: the importance and potential effectiveness of parliamentary work by disciplined Irish parliamentarians and a belief that a resolution of the land question by a British parliament opened the way towards a patriotic unity of the classes in Ireland itself which enhanced the prospects for self-government. But there was one key element of personal Parnellite political philosophy which can not be dismissed as mere conjunctural manoeuvring:
He had heard some people say, ‘Oh, I am not a Home Ruler—I am a tenant righter.’ He had to say to such a man, ‘I don’t care what you are.’ . . . There was no antagonism between them and there could be none (cheers). Settle the
land question on a firm basis, give the tenant farmers the right to live on their farms, level the barriers that divided class from class, and there would be no interest sufficiently strong to retain English misgovernment, and they would then have Home Rule (cheers).73
This is the clue to the celebrated question of whether Parnell reached, as John Devoy later claimed, a ‘definite agreement’ with him on political principles on 1 June 1879.
Parnell did have a series of meetings with Devoy in March, April and June 1879. Devoy later claimed that a definite agreement on strategy was reached on 1 June. However, such an agreement can only have been highly notional. Parnell’s priorities, those of the Anglo-Irish squire still hoping to reconcile at least the younger section of his ‘own people’ to nationalism, and Devoy’s, those of the smallholder’s son who had shown a scathing disregard for the claims of the Anglo-Irish, were poles apart. Michael Davitt, who was also present, described Parnell’s attitude as one of friendly neutrality towards the revolutionary movement, and this rings more true.
It is worth noting the precise nature of Devoy’s claim:
The agreement entered into was in substance as follows:
First: That in the conduct of the public movements so far as Parnell and Davitt could influence it, there should not be anything said or done to impair the vitality of the Fenian movement or to discredit its ideal of complete National Independence, to be secured by the eventual use of physical force.
Second: That the demand for self-government should not for the present be publicly defined, but that nothing short of a National Parliament with power over all vital national interests and an Executive responsible to it should be accepted.
Third: That the settlement of the Land Question to be demanded should be the establishment of a peasant proprietary to be reached by compulsory purchase.